


the difference

by sciencemyfiction



Series: Rally Ho - Warriors of Light [1]
Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-20
Updated: 2019-10-20
Packaged: 2020-12-31 07:20:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21112973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sciencemyfiction/pseuds/sciencemyfiction
Summary: indulgent OC fic aboutneranishin's Neran and my WoL Marcellette ty FF14 friends





	the difference

It had been weeks since she'd sent the letters, and in her heart, as much as Marcellette would've liked to say Neran had been in her thoughts since then, there had been more pressing matters to attend. Life-threatening robots to break into chunks of scrap metal, a primal here, an assassin there. 

You know, the little stuff. 

But she hadn't expected to find him out in the ass-end of nowhere, Sagolii, chopping furiously away at a sickly, sunseared tree with- instead of a hatchet- his sword. 

She watched him at it a while; and her head rang with the customary warning bells that she was about to get a wallop of memories that weren't supposed to be hers. Someday, she was going to find Hydaelyn and sit her down and explain that _stealing personal moments from other people _wasn't her style, thank you very much. It didn't matter if the Echo was a gift; Marcellette hated invading people's privacy, and hated even more that she couldn't turn it off once it triggered. 

Thinking to preserve him from the embarrassment of knowing that she _knew _something about him, she shifted to her right, the aura of incoming visions coalescing around her like an aether only she could see. Her boot scuffed in the dirt, displacing enough to make sound that carried. It was, of course, too late; she didn't make it two steps before the weight of the vision came crashing down on her, and worse, as her sight bled gray she caught the silhouette of her friend, jerking in surprise at the sound of her movement. She didn't hear him call out to her, but she suspected he probably had. 

People usually did. 

_Garlemald. _She'd been places like this, if not in the country proper, in her travels. It was a grim sort of place, all grids and vaguely Allagan city substructures. Visions rarely had proper color, but this one felt exceptionally low on color, all desaturated. Hard lines, whites and blacks. Everything had a place to be put, a role it was meant to fulfill, in Garlemald. Marcellette got the feeling that some of the reason it felt so cold and so colorless was because of that simplicity. No need for warmth or color if it complicated things, after all. 

There wasn't anyone else around, at the moment, so it wasn't hard to guess whose memory she was about to intrude upon; but she was surprised, all the same, by the unusually timid figure she found. Her silly oaf Nern, with his too-tall gangly Garlean legs, looked so miserably tiny here. He wasn't himself, here. 

He was so unhappy, here. 

She tried to parse as little as possible; it was her way of getting back at the crystal, taking only the information deemed so important that forced its way into her mind, leaving as much of the precious detail undisturbed and undistributed as she could. But. _But._ She could feel so palpably how unhappy he was. How wrong the role forced upon him had been. 

He had a sword here, too. And a uniform, wrong cut. Uncomfortable. A trainer, teaching him how to fight. Berating him for missing a stance, for stepping wrong. Plying his trust, promising to protect him from those who would use his own self against him, and then-

And then- 

No, it was mixed. She could see the teacher from Garlemald, but also a paladin, here. The memory was warped, she could see that now: the distant past overlaying something more recent, still fresh. Maybe this was the reason he was even here, right now. A fight, fury, betrayal anew. Different than _then._ But it didn't feel like it. 

She understood all too well about how things mixed in the mind, as time passed. She took a sharp breath, and felt the static on her mind starting to lift; took another, and blinked hard, and again, and again until the ringing in her ears cut out. 

"-ay?! L-look, I- I don't know what you saw, but-" 

Neran realized that Marcellette was hearing what he said, now, and his voice squeaked into silence, betraying him as surely as had those figures of his past. She could see him running rapid calculations, panicking at the thought that she had _seen_ him, seen some secret thing that she wasn't supposed to, and that everything was about to change. 

She thought of something stupid he'd said once, when they'd first met, and took his outstretched hand, ignoring the fact that it had been hovering more towards defense than offered in aid. Marcellette wasn't going to let that be their story: and as soon as she took his hand instead of striking it away, he fell into the role of helper, pulling her to her feet and back off-balance, the panic replaced by confusion. 

"Thanks. Twelve be good, I thought I was going to die of heat stroke," she said, wiping at the sweat beaded on her forehead. 

Neran's brow pinched together, his frown cautious and curious. His eyes said _that wasn't heat stroke and you know it, Marci_ but she could see him clicking the pieces together. 

Before he could accuse her of lying, she pulled her flask out of her beltpouch, and took a sip, offering it to him with a wry grin. 

"What-" he changed the question mid-thought, as the war of emotions crawling across his face was finally won by panicked anger. "What are you _doing_ out here?! I- I don't need a babysitter, if that's what-!"

"No, no!" She felt her ears flatten in alarm, and tried to keep her tail from lashing, holding up a hand to forestall his fears. "I'm on an errand to mine some mythril, and there's a vein south of here that was still good, last I was out this way. Chanced on you entirely by accident, Nern."

"It's Neran," Neran said, coloring faintly, and Marcellette thought smugly that he liked the nickname after all. "And I guess...that makes sense."

"And why are _you _out here?" She pretended to inspect the tree he'd been focusing his anger on before, scouring the sand for clues instead, while she had her back to him. Six sets of footprints, messy, hard to follow. But five fallen bodies. One massive set, probably a Roe; Neran had been ambushed and rescued, it seemed. That couldn't have been fun, but he didn't seem physically injured, at least. 

In answer to her question, he only shrugged, and changed the subject. 

"Sorry I haven't seen you. I was…"

She waited. 

"I was training with the Sultansworn. I- I was training to become one of the Sultansworn."

Marcellette and Neran had bonded, when first they met, over their mutual fascination with all classes of mineral and metal; but they'd never agreed on _being a paladin_. Neran was into that sort of thing, the order it offered, the opportunity to help people by protecting them, from time to time. Sure, she did her share of trying to protect folks, too, but when it came down to it, the idea of going in close and fighting with sword and shield was too heavy for her. It made her think of a cold and lonely hill in Central Coerthas, and she hated it. 

And she hated how things mixed in memory, because she understood it all too well. 

"It's all right," she said, smiling like she did when she was thinking about the ice and snow: because it was what a hero ought to do, and she wanted to be what a hero ought to be, at least a little. "I'm glad to see you. Might've passed out in the sands if we didn't run into each other, ey?"

Neran did not believe her, and looked at her accordingly: with disbelief. 

"Ah, Nern, come on," she moaned, patting his shoulder. "Let's go to Forgotten Springs. Not a half hour's hike from here, and we can get drunk."

"You mean _I _can get drunk while _you_ lord your tolerance over me," he muttered, but he fidgeted, not taking her suggestion, not yet. "Marci, I- Marcellette?"

Well. If he wasn't going to let it go, she supposed they could talk about it. She kept her smile on, though, so he wouldn't be worried. Gods, she didn't want him to worry. R'Linvra already did enough of that for everyone. 

"What is it, Nern?"

"You saw, didn't you? You saw my...you saw me."

She wondered what answer would have been most comforting to him. She knew she wouldn't have wanted to talk about it, if someone saw what she'd seen. When Fordola had...when Fordola had, she'd felt a little vindicated, but that was different. If Neran had, she'd have felt mortified, guilty. Definitely not wanted to talk to him about it. But- well. Maybe that was the difference between them. 

Maybe sometimes it would be good to talk about things. If it was what Neran wanted, anyway. She could do that for his sake. 

"Something about the guy you've been training with, right? Looked like you got attacked. Five or six people? And some big fella swooped in to save you at the last second?" Marcellette guessed, omitting the actual vision in favor of the sand she'd scoped out. 

"Well, I wouldn't say he saved _me_," Neran complained, his pride prickling, successfully distracted from what else she might've seen. "But- yeah. Well. Yeah. It sucks. I'm mad."

"That why you're hacking trees to bits out here?" She hadn't moved her hand from his shoulder, and she squeezed it now, trying to reassure, to redirect. "Wanna go to the Gold Saucer? I know the owner, you know. Could get you a chocobo for racing."

He swallowed hard, and Marcellette grinned, letting her fangs show, unguarded and grateful to see Neran's mind turning towards the new. The worry was seeping out of him, and with her offer to consider, the rage was petering out, too. Good. 

"Well…"

"Come onnnn," she cajoled, letting him go and taking a step towards the glowing, gleaming monolith of Senor Sabotender, glittering in the desert distance. "Nothing like a good chocobo race to get your mind off things."

She heard him take the first step beside her, and then a second, and once he took the third, she fell into step beside him, taking the longest strides she could to keep up with his ridiculous tall-person pace. 

"I don't know about racing," he said, and she could hear him thinking about his own chocobo, probably still back in a stable in Ul'dah. "But I wouldn't mind seeing the birds."

"There's the spirit," Marcellette cheered, elbowing him as they continued down the road. "I can show you Hot Hot. He's my latest; I've raced there a lot, the past few years. I may not be the best, but I love a good race."

Behind them, the clearing and the unpleasant air lay forgotten. Neran's sword was probably dented from his impromptu ‘practice', but that'd be easy to fix with a whetstone or a bit of hammering, if need be. And as they approached the fork in the road leading out to the Saucer, Marcellette could feel Neran's eyes on her, curious but grateful, too, maybe, for not changing things up on him. But she could all too easily understand the need to keep the friends you found in life; to protect friendships from getting split in twain or mutated into ruins. You could only lose so much before you started fearing change, after all. 

That trait was something between them that was exactly the same. 

  
  



End file.
